RF Solutions plans chip set to support both cell phones and wireless LANs

ATLANTA--RF Solutions Inc. here today announced development of a wireless, multi-band, multi-standard RF chip set technology, which can support digital cellular phones and local area networking systems conforming to the IEEE 802.11a, b, and g formats.

The CellLAN chip set incorporates RF Solution's previous announced wireless local area network technology for dual-band solutions, called WiFLEX. The new transceiver will allow the wireless convergence of digital cellular phones and WLAN networks, according to the Atlanta company.

"There is a major market shift emerging in the convergence of cell phone technology and WLAN technology," predicted Mike Hooper, chief executive officer of RF Solutions. "The logical conclusion of this market shift is an integrated mobile computing device (cell phone, PDA, notebook computer) that can communicate with both the existing cell phone infrastructure (for voice)," he said, and WLAN networks for high-speed data applications. The CellLAN product will enable a cost-effective mobile platform that can take advantage of this network convergence."

The company said today's throughput of 11-to-54 megabits per second wireless network technology "clearly out performs" the data capability of 2.5 or 3C cellular phones. These cellular phone standards can be outperformed by a factor of over 100, said the company.

A WLAN overlay, creating "hot spots" within the existing cellular infrastructure, is a quick simple way for the carriers to begin offering competitive and truly high data rate services, suggested RF Solutions, which said it is partnering with a number of baseband/media access controller (MAC) suppliers. The five-year-old company promised to make available reference boards for designs and samples of the CellLAN chip soon. No pricing information was released.